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MGMA’s Project SwipeIT: Standardization of health insurance cards

The Medical Group Management Association (MGMA) is taking on waste…IT style.

It’s a great initiative, and I recommend that we consider getting on board.  The goal is to prevent up to 2.2 billion in waste that occurs each year through the use of non-standardized insurance cards.  By using machine-readable cards, patients, private practice clinics, and insurers can all save.  Click below to learn more about this great initiative.

MGMA’s Project SwipeIT for standardized health insurance cards

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Tannus Quatre PT, MBA is a private practice consultant and principal with Vantage Clinical Solutions, Inc., a nationwide healthcare consulting and management firm located in Bend, OR and Denver, CO.  Tannus specializes in the areas of healthcare marketing, strategy, and finance, and can be reached through the Vantage Clinical Solutions website.

Adding value to profit with predictability

Have you ever asked yourself the question, “How efficient is my practice?” If expenses are the resources invested into the practice to generate revenue, then how good are your expenses at generating revenue? The answer lies within the profit of a practice, which considers your income with the influence of your expenses.  Profit can be analyzed by looking at the following:

• Total expenses per period
• Profit per visit
• Clinician productivity

However, the key to analyzing profit is reviewing revenue and expenses from period to period and determining a range for which these numbers should fall in order to build a practice which can generate profit — with predictability. A predictable profit is difficult to manage during times of change such as when first starting your business, during an economic slowdown, when adding a new program or site, or when first starting to track data. However, just as the art of caring for patients is refined over time and ultimately produces a predictable outcome, the art of management also consists of continually fine tuning one’s practice so that the ranges for income and expenses become less variable over time, resulting in a predictable profit.

 

For example, many practices set an arbitrary management goal of increasing profit by 20%. This is vague and does not reference a specific business strategy on how to achieve the increase. A more practical goal would be to increase profit by 20% by maintaining total expenses within a certain range and maintaining income within a given range as well. From this goal separate business strategies addressing expenses and revenue can be identified.

 

Ultimately, predictable profit allows an owner or manager to make more accurate and confident business decisions, ultimately reduces risk, and adds value to the practice.

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Bridget Morehouse PT, MBA is a consultant with Steffes and Associates, a rehabilitation consulting firm based in Wisconsin.

Change Management Key to EMR Implementation

I have assisted with Electronic Medical Records (EMR) roll-out into a number of small to medium sized healthcare clinics.  Careful planning and management of these projects is important for successful EMR implementation and seems to become even more critical as the number of employees in a practice rises.  I came face-to-face with this recently as I assisted with the implementation of an IT infrastructure and a software package into a 7 physician practice with 33 employees.  Planning, management, and communication at all levels of an organization is a lot simpler when you are dealing with a handful of employees – you can actually get them all in the same room for at least a short period of time.  But, increasing this number to a clinic the size of 33 employees is quite another thing to plan for and manage.  Communication has to be more formally planned out so that it reaches all levels of the practice.  Furthermore, the skill sets and culture of the entire organization needs to be carefully analyzed (i.e. you can’t assume that everyone knows basic computer skills or that they even want to know).

Peter Polack, in his recent post on Medical Practice Trends, offers that applying the principle of “change management” will make EMR implementation much more successful.  He includes ten principles that should be considered for anyone that will be managing the implementation of a new EMR system.  These principles include such things as “addressing the human side”, “involving every layer”, “creating ownership” and “communicating the message”.  Glancing through these principles one might think that they are simple common sense considerations.  They are.  However, omiting any or not creating a plan to effectively use these principles could be the difference between success and failure.

Many “failures” of EMR systems have as much to do with poor planning and implementation as with deficiencies in the software itself. This is especially true when it comes to the changes that occur on the human side. Planning how a new EMR system will integrate within a specific practice before actually installing the software will be time well spent and, ultimately, will benefit the bottom line.

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